Goodbye ECJ - and ECHR, I'll fetch your coat

Much of what Mrs May announced yesterday as manifesto commitments was geared not at voters but at our enemies in that Other place - the Lords. I think she felt comfortable enough in a majority that she could afford a few vote losers or even vote neutrals. By custom, anything included in an election manifesto is not challengeable by the Lords. She traded, I think, maybe five seats for a smooth ride out of Europe. 

She made clear that there would be a clear break with the ECJ and good riddance. However, she gave the government five more years to rid ourselves of the ECHR. I know this will raise hackles, but I can understand her position. We're too busy with existential matters right now to kick out this frumpery; we must tolerate the ECHR humping our shin like a dirty little dog whilst we finish the important stuff. Then a decent kick should send it spinning ooh twenty yards.  

All in all, a balance of advantages. That puerile cretin Farron looks more absurd each day and Labour have become a pantomime act that the nation finds vastly entertaining. I'll wait until 9th June, but if little Owen Jones is right, Labour's failure should presage the collapse of the European left. 

Pakistani Muslim Child Sex abuse - 'Three Girls'

I was privileged to be a drinking and conversational chum to the late Sandy Fawkes in the 'French' for many years. But this is not the place for Sandy anecdotes - if you're interested, her obit in the Telegraph will leave you in little doubt how mundane most people's lives are. 

Sandy covered the Yom Kippur war for the Express in 1973 but it was her action in that year over the death of Maria Colwell of which she was most proud. Maria was killed aged 7 by an abusive stepfather, and the story floated around the news desks of the Express' black granite fortress on Fleet Street. Sandy wanted to do a piece. Her editor blocked it. "We don't do dead kids. It's not news. No one wants to read about it". It was a stance shared by every other newspaper - including the sanctimonious Guardian. Well, she fought, she manipulated and she schemed and eventually she got her way and the Express led with reports on the fate of this child at the hands of abusive adults. It was an accomplishment of which she was extraordinarily proud. The rest of the pack followed, and her Britannic Majesty's Press acquired a new duty - reflecting public outrage at child abuse. 

Press reaction to the BBC's drama Three Girls this morning reminds me of this. All the while young English girls - children - were being abused, raped, enslaved by Pakistani Muslim men of little intelligence or ability working lowly occupations in Northern cities our press was silent - despite, I strongly suspect, every newsroom in the country knowing the story but 'spiking' it, as they had with the death of Maria Colwell. Now it seems the dam has broken. Julie Bindel in the Indie is amongst those now claiming to have known since 2006 what was going on. Why then, dear, did your paper not publish anything at the time?

Prepare for more of this 'Me too!' post hoc rationalisation as journos claim "I emailed someone about this, ooh, years ago. Or mentioned it in the pub. Or maybe made a joke about it......"

Sandy in the 'French'

Is it surprising that we're anti-corporatist?

Just as there's a gulf between nationalism and patriotism, and between supporting an internationalist approach and feeding globalism, the chasm between capitalism and corporatism has never been greater. 

If capitalism is using your own wealth in circumstances of risk with the aim of increasing not only your own but your nation's wealth, then corporatism must be using the wealth of others in circumstances of minimal risk with the aim of screwing your own people in order to make a small group of globalist thieves even richer. 

I reproduce the following from the Telegraph without further comment.

Anyone still wondering who really benefits from big corporate mergers need only look at the prospectus issued last week for the marriage of Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management. Certainly it’s not the employees, 800 of whom stand to lose their jobs, though there are fat retention fees for the top brass.

The £200m a year eventually saved by this cull seems scarcely worth the bother, taking into account the £320m in “integration” costs it will take to get there. So who is this merger really for? Not the shareholders either, who I have rarely seen so utterly underwhelmed by the claimed commercial logic of a deal as they are by this one. Nor the customers, who as usual go unconsulted. But when it comes to City advisers – now you’re talking.

Together they share a stonking great £97m, some £15.6m of it in legal fees alone, split between Slaughter and May, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Maclay Murray & Spens. The lion’s share of the rest goes to Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. What a racket.

It's time to jail Rupert and Fenella

Back in the early 80s Rupert and Fenella's conspicuous hipness was pretty innocuous; they would open a baked potato stand in the newly renovated Covent Garden or build an accessible recording studio in a disused Methodist Church hall. Imbued with money and a desire to demonstrate their fashionable altruism they would tag these adventures 'community' or 'open' or 'collaborative' and the more astute amongst them would later sagely turn them to sound profitable investments when the reputational kudos was exhausted. 

These days Rupert and Fenella have to go a bit further afield to win youthful cachet. 

"Rupert's bought this old Scottish Trawler, yah, and he's re-purposed it to carry a couple of RIBs and built a mini clinic, all through this charity we've set up - 'Seaguard Rescue International' - we've had some pretty big donations including from you-know-who who's still using the billions he made on Black Wednesday ...yah, it's all terribly tax efficient and registered offshore; well basically Rupert patrols the Med just outside the Libyan territorial limit til he gets a satphone call from a refugee boat, meets it, takes the refugees off and lands them in Lampedusa. 

We've got a Facebook page with live Sat video feed and Rupert looks simply scrumptious and sooo dashing and we've saved hundreds and hundreds of lives yah and Tarquin and Penny Arsetrump are down there too in an old coaster with an onboard dentist - Tarquin's younger bruv, actshy- and they reckon the NGOs - that's what they call us - have landed nearly ten thousand refugees in Italy this year, yah, and we've got the peak season coming ..."

Of course what all the Ruperts and Fenellas and their socially committed financial backers don't realise, but what our government increasingly does, is that they're breaking the law - by knowingly making themselves part of the people smuggling chain facilitating unlawful entry into a EU country, they are quite possibly in breach of s.25 of the Immigration Act 1971 (as amended). Fenella's next phone call might be less hubristic.

"Mummy? Oh God it's awful I'm at Paddington Green police station and Rupert's been seized by the SBS and brought home and charged with people smuggling and they say we could get fourteen years! Oh Mummy please help; the Navy sunk our trawler with gunfire and Tarquin and Penny are on the run in Panama oh it's all such a mess ......" 

PPERA: The third leg of the stool

Keeping Labour out of power since 2010 has allowed our democracy a chance at correcting the deep corruption of our democratic systems that had crept-in during Labour government. I put it no more strongly than that; under Labour, democratic systems tend to corruption whilst under Tory government some healing and maintenance take place. 

Two legs of the stool - voter registration and the Electoral Quotient - have already undergone or are undergoing substantial correction. The 2022 election will be fought on new mostly equal constituency boundaries with mostly real voters within them. The third leg - party finance - remains a running sore, to mix my metaphors. Quite how Labour, who vaunt such pretence at 'equality, ' could allow such unequal, discriminatory and inequitable errors to pollute our democratic system is beyond my understanding.  

Party finance is a sod. Today's announcement that the CPS will not be proceeding against 14 constituencies in which the cost of the Tory battlebus was not accounted against the candidate's £30k spend limit is probably right. When Soros is deploying millions in a secret, unaccountable campaign in his own interests that undermines the British people the operating costs of an old coach really do seem trivial. I harbour faint hopes that the intelligence services will serve up Soros like a roast turkey when they are ready.

Labour won't cap donations because it would restrict Union funding. Both parties now want to fight campaigns as central, metropolitan advertising campaigns using slick voter targeting and marketing tools. A million unpaid supporters of their own views (including of course we bloggers) pump out words and memes over the social channels at our own cost. Technology and secret money, together with the peerages for loans scandal of the Blair years which Cameron continued without shame, bent commercial and trade deals, promises to the Bruvvers and other corrupting influences all make a nonsense of the PPERA provisions as they stand. Voters roundly (and rightly) reject State funding - the idiotic proposals from both Hayden Phillips and Christopher Kelly would have preserved the wealth of the LibDems but would also have brought UKIP £12m a year whilst Mr Carswell was sitting for the party and Zero when he wasn't. 

I do therefore look forward to a vigorous debate amongst those that care on how we may best reform this third leg of our democratic stool.  

Austria and why EU members are running scared

It starts with the bees. And human greed. This part of Austria is home to the Carniolan bee, and government legislation prohibits the introduction of foreign bee varieties. In this, it is strongly supported by the region's amateur beekeepers (of whom I hope to be one later this year) who work hard to keep alive traditional apiculture in the valleys and heights. Indeed, Wald Honig or honey made 'in the forest' sells at a premium and is quite delicious. So far, the purity of our unique bee sub-species is being maintained in a sustainable and committed way. 

The villains are the 'professional' bee keepers. Like many Austrians, they've become used over the past twenty years to high incomes for little work. So they keep more hives than they can manage, don't have time for the hour a week hygiene routine that each hive needs, and the Varroa parasite loads on their colonies (or 'bee people' in the local lingo) are through the roof. Their answer to high Varroa mortality is to keep even more bees and factor the loss of up to 20% of hives, like Great War generals throwing whole divisions into the slaughter. Secondly, they're too greedy for the valuable honey, and don't leave the bees enough of their own to get through the harsh -20deg winters, substituting with cheap sucrose the healthy gold they overharvest. Thirdly, they want to introduce the higher yielding Buckfast bee to force out the Carniolan natives. All to help maintain their income. I'm pleased to say they've been seen off for now, but we're all watching like hawks as no-one trusts them an inch.   

The fruit growers are the same. They've introduced foreign heavier cropping varieties that bud and flower much earlier in the season than the native plants, which have learnt over several thousand years all about late frosts. The consequence is inevitable; a late frost decimates their foreign fruit crops and they whine for compensation. It's greed. It's just happened again.

This is macho country, where a man needs to be a man and must drive a 4 x 4 resembling a Humvee and weighing two tonnes to prove it. They all lie that of course they've bought them for cash, but most know that they're all purchased under the universal 5 year leases that keep the motor industry afloat. More debt.

This is a protectionist economy where no-one has to work too hard. Estate agent fees are fixed by law at 3%, so they don't even have to pretend to be competitive and the product is dire. Property adverts on the web are often little more than a couple of blurred and wonky cellphone pictures and a couple of lines of text - why should they bother? 

The generation at fault is the boomers, roughly my own age cohort. Their parents proudly owned without debt their own homes, many of them small hobby farms, frequently with enough land for the son or daughter to build their own home on when they married, but always fully owned. Then came the pre-2008 financial tsunami with the crooked, now bust, Alpe Adria bank lending absurd huge sums for junk security. And boy did the younger Austrians load up on debt. The end result is most of that previously debt-free real estate is now heavily mortgaged. One generation has squandered the wealth of all its forebears, and now has nothing but debt and liability to pass on. A jerk in interest rates, a shock to the shaky debt structure and the whole lot will come tumbling down.

Austria is a country that's quite good at forgetting. In this case, they want to forget that the country was actually quite poor until the last generation; my cousins here used a horse until the 1980s for farm muscle, and their mother lived her life in a wooden blockhouse with an outside lavvy and the cowshed connected by passage to the kitchen. However, their reluctance to admit the recent past (even more than the more distant past) is mistaken - it's not the past rural poverty that's shameful, but the current debt and greed. They're unwilling to work for competitive rates, and rely on protectionist measures including the Finance Police raiding firms using cheaper Slovenian workers, but such measures are doomed to failure.

There's an article in the Telegraph by Peter Foster that I commend. And yes, I blame the EU for the coming earthquake; they bought the silence of Europe's people with crooked bribes and false wealth. They have destroyed whole countries and communities in their lust for power, and the bill is still to pay. No wonder they're terrified by Brexit into drunken braggadocio. 

The horse was called Lottie. Shamed that I can't readily recall my cousin's name

Britain's fish will feed Europe - at a price

One key outcome of Brexit that must form a Red Line for the UK is the reclaim of our exclusive economic zone from the EU. Do not take this for granted; they don't want to give it up, and no wonder. There will be a fight over this, but in the over-riding national interest we must be implacable. No deals, no shared sovereignty - we'll have the lot back from 2019. 

A glance at the bathymetric map will reveal our advantage. French and Spanish EEZs also extend to 200 miles - but mostly over deep waters. Ours are almost wholly over the rich, fecund, warm continental shelf on which sea life thrives - if not overfished. Britain's fish resources are the richest in Europe, and currently belong to the EU. 

This is also a key reason to form a close and mutually beneficial alliance with Norway; also outside the EU; between us we own 70% of Europe's fish. Denmark, NL, Belgium, Germany and France all have inconsequential fishing waters.  

Make no mistake, we will have our waters back, no exceptions, no qualifications. And we alone will decide who may fish those waters and how much may be taken. A robust conservation policy coupled with determined and aggressive enforcement will restore these seas to a marine resource teeming with life. One thing is clear - Europe will pay far more dearly for its fish in the future than now. 

Surely now is the time to honour Farage?

Well, the electors seem to be clear; UKIP has done its job and can now retire with honour and dignity. UKIP members have seen the evolution of their party from a fringe movement to a vast steamer that garnered 4m votes and scared the stools from a complacent Tory party that previously thought Euroscepticism was manageable. It was UKIP that forced Cameron into a referendum, and Nigel Farage that won it. No mean achievements either for the leader or any of the party's members. 

Leave is now mainstream, gaining new supporters daily, helped in no small part by the undecideds seeing for the first time the brutal naked aggression of which the Brussels federation is capable. Remainers are becoming like flat earthers. Farron reminds me of the chap who used to parade a placard on the steps of the Mirror building on Old Fetter Lane declaring that meat caused sin. The whine from the Guardian is growing less shrill, and June 8th should kill off a whole cohort more of remainers, as the country shifts firmly behind Theresa May as the best champion for Britain. 

Yes, I know there are those who think May the devil in disguise and that it's all a great conspiracy to rob UKIP but I really don't think this is the case. What I do believe and believe strongly is that Nigel Farage should be recognised by his country, and perhaps now is a good time. He's achieved something extraordinary, and I'm sure we will see him limned in bronze at size-and-a-third at some stage in some prominent place. Oh, we don't give away Apsley House type gifts to our victors any more, but Farage deserves something tangible. 

More Assets, more money to come to UK from EU ..

It may just have escaped your notice that the EU's propaganda showhouse, called "The house of European History", is set to open in four days. With an architectural style of which Herr Speer would surely have approved, it lacks only naked blond corn-mädchen with laurel wreaths on the pediment. 

Of course, the museum is empty of both objects and interpretive exhibits, save for the Nobel medal for something meretricious or the other given to the EU. It is the sole exhibit. This is for two reasons. Firstly, the construction budget over-ran initial budgets by a factor of four, to a total of €137m, swallowing the exhibits budget to pay for the building. When last I built a new museum the exhibition costs (lighting, cases, interpretation, simple interactives, audio visual etc) came to £1,500/m2 for a low key delivery. You can double that for the EU museum - which has 4,000m2. 

The second reason is that the 27 can't agree how to interpret European history. What can the museum say about the Germans?  I fear any interpretation of the past is doomed to failure, but that's now the business of the 27.

The question is, what of our share? Do we ask for 12% of the cost back, or demand that they now build a detached annex, under our control, in which to display just British history?

Incidentally, I publish below the EU's own table from http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20141202IFG82334/eu-budget-explained-expenditure-and-contribution-by-member-state

If you divide the total by 52 you get, erm, €350m a week. Oh, and we also passed over 75% of €4.27bn ( €3.2bn) in tariffs for goods coming in through the UK.

Post-election Parliament must be ready for a raft of emergency Bills

The government has recently realised that our powers to impose sanctions currently arise from the EU - and that when we leave, we will need domestic legislation in place to legally do so. Legislating to remediate this situation may be no great problem. Now it is clear that we are leaving the EU, one way or another, an Act can be passed with a 'Coming into force' date co-terminous with our formal exit date. However, not all the legislation we will need will be so straightforward.

As Juliet Samuel makes clear in a cogent and compelling piece for the Telegraph;

Despite the EU’s moderation on paper, however, prospects for a smooth Brexit are currently far from rosy. The weekend’s headlines were flavoured with a classic Brussels tincture – a poisonous media briefing and a Jean-Claude Juncker soundbite. None of this would have been unleashed without Berlin’s blessing and suggests that German attitudes are hardening. Chancellor Angela Merkel appears to have bought into the idea that the EU must make an example of Britain in order to protect itself. The wrong side is winning the argument. This may be because most EU governments don’t yet believe they have much to lose. They cannot conceive that Britain would ever walk away from a deal, however unpalatable its terms. On this, they have misjudged.

Samuel makes clear that we must prepare now to walk away without a deal, and assume that this will be the outcome of the negotiations. If we manage to reach a satisfactory deal, fine. But if we don't, as seems more likely, we will be ready. 

We should not underestimate the global economic and financial shock of leaving with no deal. We must be prepared to look after the UK's interests, and if possible those of the Commonwealth and of the USA - the anglosphere. We will need emergency wartime powers and more importantly a national consensus that may mean a wartime cabinet - with opposition ministers sitting in government. Parliament needs to be ready to legislate on the hoof, reservists ready to be called up, the red duster fleet ready to serve the nation and yes, possibly even rationing systems to be devised and rolled out and temporary state control of food, fuel and power. Bills must be drafted NOW to meet an emergency.

This election is an essential fore-runner to facing a time of such emergency. The Prime Minister needs the backing of the country - the Commons will not be of one voice in the debate to reject a humiliating and wounding offer from the EU, but once the house has voted in favour of walking away, they will all be behind it or face the wrath of voters. The Lords are a different kettle of fish. We cannot allow these deeply corrupted and befouled fifth columnists to sabotage the national interest. Mrs May no doubt also has a reserve plan to deal with these foreign agents in our midst.

I do hope the Bank has been quietly buying back the nation's gold reserves so foolishly squandered by the last Labour chancellor. As the talks collapse and gold shoots past £1,400 an ounce we will need every kilo we can get. 

Herr Tirana prepares to use dirty tricks as EU buggered

Herr Tirana, one of the EU's several Presidents, confirmed today that "after a little cellar work and a touch of bastinado" all 27 EU leaders have now confessed agreed to the Brussels dirty tricks campaign to be rolled out against the United Kingdom.

"The EU must uphold democracy in Europe, which means agreeing with whatever the unelected officials want. We call it pure democracy because it is unsullied by elections, ballots and the votes of the ignorant and stupid common people.

You can never have too many boats ....

A bit of a fuss in the papers at news that Nick Serota's retirement gift from his colleagues was to be a boat. It's pretty certain that what's intended is something like the Enterprise pictured below rather than an Oyster 82.

These fun boats can still be had for about £600 - and of course you can keep it in the front garden.

Ah, such memories of idle summers spent on the river between Woodbridge Tide Mill and Felixtowe Ferry with a boom tent and a crate of Tolly

Economic war with Germany heats up

AEP in the Telegraph this morning says it all:-

(Berlin) demanded that Britain desist from tax dumping and financial deregulation that would “jeopardize the stability of the union". This demand is almost insulting. British regulators have led efforts to recapitalize banks. It is the eurozone and Germany that have dragged their feet on tougher capital rules.

There is no longer any attempt at diplomatic tact. The document states that the European Commission will "determine" when the UK has made "sufficient progress" as it jumps through the hoops, the way it handles accession talks for supplicants hoping to join. It reads like an imperial curia discussing a colony.

........ What is clear is that if the final document presented to Britain looks anything like the EU papers circulating this week, no sovereign state can accept it.

Sigh. Like the same-old same-old. Like the demands presented by Austria Hungary to Serbia in 1914, Germany's demands are impossible for the British realm to accept. Not even the softest, most accommodating Brexit negotiators could accept such national humiliation under the heel of the Hun. 

I fear it will be full blown economic warfare. 

Turks join with ISIS to attack Kurds

Turkey has launched a new offensive against the Kurds. They now face attacks from Turkey to the north and west, and from ISIS to the south and east. It has been a century since the last Islamist rulers of Turkey slaughtered the region's Armenian Christians in an act of genocide that preceded the later Holocaust, but the Kurds must surely have the Islamist capacity for mass extermination embedded in their cultural history. Their fight against the Islamists of Turkey and of ISIS is one for survival. 

The history of the Armenian genocide will be purged from Turkish history now that Erdogan can rule as a dictator. In Germany and Austria, where holocaust denial is a crime for which residents can find themselves in prison, millions of Turkish migrants who voted for Erdogan's Enabling Act will be teaching their children that the earlier Armenian holocaust never happened. Every effort of the national authorities to teach it in schools will be met with hatred, resentment and disbelief - and demands for more Islamic schools, in which such inconvenient truths can be smothered. 

But one and a half million Christians slaughtered by means as foul as any ISIS have re-invented remind us always why we must resist Islamism with every fibre of our national strength. 

French Toast

As will be apparent, France's electoral system is geared at preventing shock change and powerful leaders. Remember that the French bourgeois virtues include médiocrité, which means something a little different there to our jibe of mediocrity. And having soundly rejected the 'constitutional' parties of right and left for the Presidential election, French voters may not have the same choice for the two-stage Assembly elections on the 11th and 18th of June. Well-oiled local Republican and Socialist party machines may cement support, leaving Macron a lame duck President with no support in the Assembly.

And yes, short of some earthquake shock, Macron will be France's next president. 

Marine Le Pen is not finished - France and Britain will both go to the polls again in 2022, and in political terms that's an eon away. As for what this all means for Brexit, I'll guess little change. The Kermits still hate us and want us to suffer because we're so much more successful than they are, yet we need to co-operate even more closely militarily as the only two armed nations in Europe. It's all French toast - brittle with burnt crumbs. Hey ho.

Extra Territorial Jurisdiction

There is an interview in the Indie this morning with lawyer David Edward in which he lambastes the 'invincible ignorance' of those who think the UK can escape the jurisdiction of the ECJ. Edward sat as an ECJ judge, but perhaps not a very balanced one as his argument here is utterly distorted and deeply misleading.

"You can escape the jurisdiction of the ECJ, but you have got to comply with EU standards if you are going to export into the EU. And who decides what these standards are ultimately if there’s a problem? It’s the ECJ." Edward is quoted as saying. Uhm, yes. But EU exporters wishing to sell to the UK - by far the greater value of goods - must in turn comply with UK standards. And who will decide what those standards are if ultimately there's a problem? The UK Supreme Court and English / Scottish appeal courts. 

Never have I heard any Brexiteer suggest that British courts should exercise Extra Territorial Jurisdiction to decide what product standards within the EU should be. It's a nonsense. Edward is refuting a claim that no-one has made. His argument is specious and fallacious; in exercising our own jurisdiction over trade, competition and commercial law for all actions within UK territorial boundaries of course we escape ECJ jurisdiction. I weep for the 'invincible ignorance' of those like Edward in a state of denial over this fundamental reality. On our land, in our skies and upon our seas out to the 200 mile economic limit, British courts will exercise sole jurisdiction. British laws, British standards, British judgements and British penalties will prevail. 

And of course EU citizens will continue to enjoy access to UK courts to resolve matters within British territorial jurisdiction just as UK citizens will continue to enjoy access to the ECJ to resolve matters within EU jurisdiction. If a Polish single mum feels she is wrongly being denied a British welfare benefit, she has exactly the same recourse to our legal system as any Brit. And likewise a Brit in Europe to the ECJ. What exactly is the problem?

It's a manufactured issue, promoted by those who wish to preserve such bonds of slavery to Euro Federalism beyond Brexit. English common law never did fit well, if at all, with the Napoleonic codex approach of the mainland, yet it maintains itself as both a superior body of law and a more equitable legal jurisdiction than the 'political' fandangling of the ECJ. 

This is an economic battle between Britain and Germany

It is becoming transparently clear that Brexit is an economic battle between Britain and Germany. It is also becoming clear that EU membership is costing us way more than the headline contributions, before or after rebate. One of the EU's several Presidents, Herr Tirana, repeated yesterday in effect that they're so desperate for our wealth that they encourage voters to overturn Mrs May so we may repent and continue to bleed our nation's life blood for the vampire squid.

Germany knows the lead that a fractional advantage in GDP growth can produce over a decade. Yep, one nation grows at 1.1% and another at 1.6% and it doesn't sound much until you look at the lead after 20 years - 13% for these figures. That's been Germany's game plan since the 1970s - free riding NATO, skewing the rules, manipulating EU budgets and quiet economic sabotage to ensure their GDP growth is greater than ours. And now they're furious, they're incandescent with rage that they've been found out and that we're leaving. By doing so we ensure that our GDP takes the lead - not only will Trump make them pay an extra 1% of GDP to NATO, but they must pay 25% of the EU's budget from 2019 or see it unravel.

Hence the bullying, the threats and the attempted intimidation; we must pay €60bn, we must submit to the German European Court until 2030, we must follow their instructions. It's becoming clear that we won't do any of it, that we will walk away. So be it. Alone and ahead.

I'll miss Gisela and wish Bob well ...

There had to be casualties of course. Few regret the abandonment of his political career by Osborne; the Commons will be infinitely improved by his absence, and the housebuilders' brochure that is the Evening Standard, an organ that once was a newspaper, will no doubt benefit from his family wallpaper and soft furnishings expertise.

Gisela Stuart will be a real loss. The Labour Leave campaign leader was a boon to the cause before the referendum, and did much to counter the swivel-eyed loon barb thrown at we outers. She is transparently straightforward and shines as, well, just nice. 

Bob Marshall-Andrews is a Medway fixture and I wish him well in his move to the Lib-Dems, despite my wanting to see that party destroyed in Parliament. I can't imagine Medway without Bob; a rebel and maverick who used to publicly but pointlessly prompt the Labour leadership to give him a job. Rochester is a bit twee and has pretentions, but remains more Tesco than Waitrose, sandwiched between Emily Thornbury's white van Strood and Borstal. Chatham is as rough as a badger's arse, the home of pale, scabrous and violent Chavs, and Gillingham houses aspirational but just-coping NHS workers. Bob has done a great job there, transcending party. I wish him well.  

Game On!

Well, she's done it. And she's got the £ nudging €1.20, which is nice. And the global corporates are squeezing out a little high pressure flatus, which is also reassuring. Farron, Mandlebum, the Remoaners, the BBC, the EU and the Guardian are incandescent with rage, which is always worthwhile. All in all, it seems like the right thing to do. 

The main complaint of all those so upset by Mrs May's calling an election seems to be democracy. They are objecting to Britain's voters having a definitive say, rather than claiming to speak for us themselves. 

Oh yes. And that chap Grayling, which I always thought was a fish. If this doesn't trip him into gibbering insanity I don't know what will. So good all round, really. 

Isn't it time we re-issued 'Protect and Survive'?

There will be many homes in Britain that still have the last edition of the Home Guide to Nuclear War, issued by the government as Protect and Survive. Maybe in a telephone drawer somewhere, along with the radiator bleed key and a 1976 warranty card for the doorbell. However, whole new generations will be unaware of the simple preparations they must make if we are faced with nuclear Armageddon. Technology has also moved on, so an updated edition of this friendly guide to mass extinction may be worthwhile. 

It may be useful to remind the younger ones that iPhones are unlikely to work after an intense EM pulse, that a couple of tins of energy drink won't last long and that Facebook is unlikely to be widely available with which to share nuclear experiences. Ditto Instagram. It's also unwise to rely on take-away delivery services for food after the bomb falls, however impervious Mr Wu seems to Alpha particles. And as members of the family die and the bodies must be dealt with, Yell will not be the best source of home service providers. 

It's about time we scared the youngsters.